Ꮥ ℳℌ ᏐᏁ (SAMHAIN)
by lucius-complex
Summary: If dreams are the stuff that tell us who we are, then Tony Stark wants very differently from he imagined. Part of series.
1. Chapter 1

1

In his dreams, Tony often sees him bathing in the river, its waters brown and murky, reflecting the nest of trees around it. It might be autumn. It should be cold, but Tony never feels it. Perhaps he simply isn't a stickler for unnecessary details.

In his dreams, Loki is naked and Tony is not, yet dream after dream he is never able to catch sight of an inch of the god's alabaster skin, not even his face. All he sees is water, the form of him; the glistening wetness and the slopping sound of liquid movement. This is all his imagination will give him.

Tony does little in these dreams but watch Loki wash himself, half submerged and always veiled by a thin white sheet that covers his entire body, as if he is wrapped up in a handkerchief. As if he fancies himself a ghost, or one who shies away from all eyes.

In Tony's dreams his throat is always parched. There are always specific moments when Loki rubs at his shoulder blades or smooths a hand along his ribcage that makes Tony wonder sometimes if the veil upon Loki's skin might be sentient, the way it presses itself onto the god's flesh. Sometimes he wonders if it would mind if Tony were to press his mouth over it, to form a vacuum with his lips and suck the water onto the desiccated cavern of his throat.

**_~o0o0o~_**

Tony's dream-self never examines the damp forest bed he spends his dreams in. He never ventures beyond the pool and never looks too hard into the water; sensing unnameable things that move below its murky red-brown depths. A voice within him whispers that so long as he does not look too hard nothing but Loki will be real, so he merely leaves them be. Not everything in his dreams are worth investigating, and he doesn't want this evasive fantasy to turn into a nightmare just yet.

For now, he simply wants to watch Loki bath.

To be honest, Tony is never sure if it is Loki whom he watches every night, crouched behind coniferous bushes as the wet, heavy smell of the throbbing earth rises from the ground.

Deep beneath him, Tony can feel the earth having sex with itself. Everything under him is in a constant state of writhing, rubbing, fucking. He can feel the moistness of the earth as if part of it, black and inviting and wet. Sometimes he dips his hands into the muck, imagines smearing it over white sheet. Staining it, rubbing his soil into it, making it black. Parting the limbs beneath the sheets in the most tender act of descecration and forcing himself between them. Pressing Loki's cocooned body with its freshly-soiled skin into the earth's rich, fertile loam.

Tony wants Loki seized, hauled out of the protective waters of his pool where the god keeps himself clean and solitary and untouchable. He wants Loki stained. He wants to rub himself into every crevice, pour silt into that opened mouth and press his hand over it to keep it there.

He wants to say to the god; 'Swallow me. Let me swallow you.'

But these are just dreams within dreams, and in real life Tony sees no veil-draped ivory fleshed alien god; and even in his dreams Loki never looks up from his compulsive self-cleaning.

Some days, he thinks it's a good thing he doesn't have Loki - in real life or dreams; because he thinks he could quite easily bury that alabaster body in quicksand, find beauty and tenderness in the way the god would trash and gasp for breath beneath stained white sheets - until he eventually surrenders, finally hold himself so beautifully, exquisitely still for Tony to do with him as he will.

Tony thinks its a good thing these are just dreams.

**_~o0o0o~_**


	2. Chapter 2

2

Years pass, and Tony never tells a soul about his dreams, neither its subject matter nor the disquieting fact that they stay the same from night to night: dark trees, dark soil - body of red-brown water, body wrapped in white.

Years pass, and Tony is still frozen in place by a setting and sequence now as familiar to him as the shrapnel in his chest; tableau of one who watches, one who washes. Sometimes as he watches Loki he fancies the the device between his ribcage throbbing an alien pain, as if playing the role of a breaking heart, and it seems to Tony that he's forever fated to attract foreign bodies – fatal ones - into himself.

Years pass.

The branches spread themselves every wider over the pond; the water rustles and slops, red and wet and warm as freshly spilled blood but Tony is human and knows not to read its divining mummers. He thinks the waters speak to Loki, because the god would sometimes pause in his cleaning, as if listening to something; but Tony can make no expression from beneath that ghostly veil.

When they do meet in the battlefield of life, it is Tony whom is veiled, concealed behind an iron mask. In real life, Tony goes about his day and feels little of the customary appetite that haunts his nights. He harbours little interest for the real world Loki, long having since discovered they were not the same person. They couldn't be.

The real world Loki is ugly and twisted, full of rage and hatred. Tony cannot be in love with this hard, attention-hungry, brittle and embittered god. He loves only the Loki of his dreams, the bather; Venus and Persephone, water nymph and mermaid.

More and more he twitches for a machine that could help him while away the waking hours a little faster, always falling short of getting down to the business of inventing one; sensing within it a path of no return. Dull as the world was, Tony can still tell between the two. He's still cognizant of its anchoring safety; he simply doesn't care for it. Why would he, when just within reach lies another world where the Loki of his dreams brushes past his skin like the lightest sweep of silk?

Thus does he willingly relinquishes the real world, and in his dreams his bather calls to him, or rather he to Loki, the forest silent and and waiting for the next tableau. Always in his dreams is this sense of expectancy – of action about to be. More and more he resigned himself to that action being one of violence; perhaps rape.

Definitely eventual.. abduction.

Ah, abduction. Tony hadn't know it until he thought it, and suddenly he knows it was there all along; in the very air. He had created his dream for precisely that, and now he knows what he must do.

A part of Tony is sure the Loki of his dreams is both deaf and blind; eyes unseeing, senses submerged. Such could be why the god does not seem to notice the pool of liquid around him slowly shrinking; soaked up by parched earth. Nor does he sense Tony's presence creeping closer over the crawling months.

**_~o0o0o~_**

Initially, as soon as it occured to him the idea had repulsed him, driven him from his own head. Is he so filthy? Is there no end to his greed, no redemption from the darkness hiden in his metal chest?

For weeks and months he struggles against it, alternately enaroured and repelled, until the day he is blasted out of the open sky in a surprise encounter with the real god of mischief, vibrant and terrible, clad in green armour and blackest contempt.

Tony blinks in recovery; he is sure they are in the real world for Loki smiles at him as he lands on the ground; as sly, as sharp and engaged as the Loki of his dreams is soft and disconnected.

'How I tire, Stark, of the way you dodge my every footstep,' the god drawls as he approaches the crater where Tony lies, trying to recover his breath. Resting his booted foot on top of Tony's right wrist, the god peels the gauntlets away with the tip of his spear. 'If I didn't know better I'd say you're quite obsessed.'

Tony had thought himself stealthy, but of course trying to outsmart the God of Mischief was sooner or later going to end him with occasional egg on the face. He simply had to roll with it; attempt not to get killed in the process.

'Don't flatter yourself; your highness, you're not that pretty.'

Instead of answering Loki hooks the blunt end of his spear around Tony's's other wrist and anchors them against each other, pinning his hands down.

'Why were you following me again, Stark? You've done this before haven't you?'

Tony simply grunts in reply, but Loki does not seem particularly homicidal today as he cocks his head, as if listening to an invisible reply.

'Well then. Be glad that I am feeling merciful today,' the god grins as he reverses the spear and plunges the blunt end of the staff into Tony's wrists. He doesn't quite scream as he feels the bones snap beneath the crushing force of the staff, but it is a near thing.

'Now, that would take at least a few months to heal, wouldn't you say? Off you go now, Stark, and send my best to mine brother.'

Tony picks himself up, crawling blindly through the red-hot haze. 'You couldn't have seen me from that far away,' he wheezes through the pain. 'Not even you.'

'Ah, but I wasn't there, you see,' Loki smirks, and from behind him, his doppelganger steps away and bows shallowly. Tony feels a violent jolt as the docile copy straightens, recognising it – him. This Loki.

This is his Loki, his bather; half spirit, half undead vessel.

The purest thing he's ever laid eyes on, and the most beautiful.

The shock is terrible upon him, and he feels a tremor pass through his body that has nothing to do with the pain in his hands.

The real Loki frowns, hands tightening around his spear. 'You have not met one of my copies before.'

Tony might be human, but he can spin out misdirections as good as any god of lies. 'A doppelganger. I'd have thought you beneath such a cheap trick.'

When the real Loki merely laughs, Tony ventures to ask; 'This copy; does it contain any of- your- spirit?'

For some reason, Loki decides to humour him. The god seems particularly amenable today, chatty even. The autumn chill seemed to agree with his temperament, and he seems to be very much amused by the direction of Tony's question.

'A small silver. I'll show you,' he says, and proceeds to hold out a gloved hand where a small semi-transparent cocoon forms. 'The spell is merely a vessel, so there needs be enough spirit for a shape to form.'

So saying Loki blows into it, and the amoeboid skein stretches and grows the way a bubble would, finally taking form into a third, fully identical god of mischief.

Tony notices that the newly made Loki is wet, with blue lips that tremble negligibly. He notices the small ripples in the skin, as if they had been unceremoniously ripped from some liquid sleep; there is a tremulous expression within those dark, wet eyes that is not quite empty. Beneath a god's notice perhaps, but not empty; and Tony latches onto this insight with greed.

'D-do they feel pain?'

The god laughs at this. 'So many questions. If you are looking for a weakness to exploit, save your breath.'

'Give one of them to me,' the mortal whispers, amazed at his own audacity.

'What?'

'Your copies. Give me one.'

The god's expression becomes cold, rapidly chilling the air. 'I don't think so, Stark. And you are a fool if you think I would relinquish my possessions so easily, even one as easy to make as this.' Then with a snap of his fingers both god and doppelgangers disappears, leaving Tony with two broken wrists and a cavity in his chest that feels like a bottomless drop into the earth.

**_~o0o0o~_**


	3. Chapter 3

3

The darker half of the year, with its moribund sunsets, scalping wind, and Samhain. Days where the veil between the living and the dead, between that which is real and that which can only be whispered becomes thinner, gossamer.

His waking hours are now filled with a terrible thirst, all too familiar from those deep-dreaming nights. Some days the want is so great, it seems to Tony that the day and night is beginning to merge into one unceasing landscape of bitter thirst.

Where is his anchor now? How could he fix a point of return, when either worlds finds him thus ensnared, dreaming of the same pale wet skin and half-empty eyes? How would he find his way within the merging of these once-disparate worlds?

When the answer finally comes to him in a bout of fever, Tony returned to his dreamatorium, to his cold ivory lab, determined to take action.

**_~o0o0o~_**

The battle to draw Loki out takes place in the remote landscapes of eastern Utah , enrages the god of mischief enough to commit him to the fray and fools him into thinking he would emerge triumphant in it. Loki uses his copies only in moments of pure confidence and convenience; a telling sign of vulnerability that Tony has spent enough time pouring through video sequences and statistics to confirm.

There is a trick to trapping a god, Tony knows; a lure made out of equal measures of truth and lies, a spell weaved tight and invisible above a puzzle sufficient to tempt even the likes of Loki; enough to draw his magic out and trap it against his will. A storing device, modelled on the arc reactor, powerful enough to store and convert magic and channel it into Tony's suit.

All in all, it turns out to be surprisingly easy for a man who no longer knows the definition of sleep.

The harder part is spiriting Loki's copy away once he had caught it, without the rest of the Avengers cottoning on and pursuing him – suspicious as they were about Tony's extracurricular activities. Tony schemes and plans and sets up traps like Chinese boxes yet in the end he catches Loki's copy by sheer luck, when Clint shoots one of them a split second before he plunges a spear into Tony's chest - and instead of the gift of death Tony receives the curse of having his utmost desire handed to him on a plate by serendipity.

As he closed his arms around the fallen figure and activates the magically spurred fusion propulsion, Tony barely had time to take it all in - the cry of rage from the true god of mischief, the shock on Steve's and Clint's face – before winking out with his prize.

**_~o0o0o~_**

The water of the lake moves unnaturally, propelled by the quickening of invisible creatures beneath it. It laps warm and red and impenetrable, and sends spikes of revulsion and naked, bone-trembling fear through him. Tony pushes through, forces himself to continue wading into the waters because waiting for the lake to dry would take too long; who knows what fancy might take the bathing god to sense Tony's desire, to flee?

He bites his cheeks and focuses on Loki and Loki alone in a bid to dispel his unease. To falter now is to lose the alien god forever, he knows. The water is unfriendly, the entire forest agitated. Only the earth feels less hostile, and did it seem as if he could see and feel through them – sense their eager thirst as if smelling the onslaught of rain?

He almost feels sorry for the bathing god who seems almost doomed not to notice Tony until it is too late, blinded by the white cocoon and the endless fretting of washing, as if he is trying to rub his own skin from his bones.

He stands before the god, and the water roila around them as if seeking to drown him, but Tony knows it cannot, not whilst it has a silver of treasure tucked away like ransom; a piece of Loki's soul securely locked up in a glass cage, sobbing for reunion with his master through cherry-red lips.

'Loki,' he whispers, and he wonders how he'd always know who the man was beneath the veil is, when he'd seen nothing all these years, known nothing aside from the keen sense of deprivation that has sharpened over time from dull ache into knife-tipped hunger.

'Who are you?' the god cries as he finally senses the foreign presence; 'What are you doing?' His hands are raised within the cocoon, it seems to Tony as if they ward him off and simultaneously plead for rescue.

'I am liberating you,' Tony says, and with one hard tug Loki's veil tore with a loud shredding sound that vibrates through the forest. He thinks he hears screaming, but he hears nothing beyond the dull triumphant knell within his head – the feasting his eyes made of the meal before him.

Finally he could see skin, and it was everything Tony wanted and more.

He thinks he imagines the earth groaning in hunger and triumph as he carries the god's body out of the water and lays him out upon the soil quivering, a mermaid. One who's birth he had just compelled, torn away from its watery womb. He had done this. He, alone could do something like this; and something in Tony is as torn as the shreds of veil lying ruins at his feet at this knowledge; some part of him is irrevocably destroyed by this action.

By his own power. Him alone. All that he can do, all he dares to do.

Loki's hair is black and long, plastered wetly in curling tendrils like dark fern around a smooth white stone. His lips are blue, his eyes red with crying. Tony has never seen such colours before – the world he once came from no longer knew such colours, nor invoked in him such emotions, such profound sense of beauty. Loki's presence on the earth seemed to illuminate the soil's darkness – its patient nature, above all its constant state of thirst.

'Return me to the water,' the god pleads. 'You know not what you wrought.'

Instead of answering Tony tastes his lips for the first time, red as velvet. Red as the first bite of the first harvest apple. Red as virginity. He thought of the abduction of Hades then. He thought of the rape of Persephone.

'This cannot hurt you, for is no more than a dream for both of us,' is all he says as he covers the pale body with his dark one. He gathered handfuls of the wet loam and smeared them on the god, covering the incandescent skin, claiming the light for his own.

'You are water, made to be drunk. I will contain your liquid. I will bath you from now on.'

And then he touches only tears, feels the terrible thirst within him slake for the first time in years.

**_~o0o0o~_**


	4. Chapter 4

4

In his dreams, Tony makes Loki weak – he gives the god the strength of a kitten, the meekness of a new born lamb. There is a large part of him that thrills in the ability to render Loki helpless. Not many had detected this trait on him because of his day to day intensity, not even Pepper; but there is a part to Tony that is in love with his own lion-like laziness. Where the thrill was not the chase, but in the begetting. He likes to win. And then he likes to admire his winnings.

It has always served as a secret source of strength.

He often did it to technology, materials. Once in a blue moon he did it to humans; after all, he had moved the entire Avengers unit into his tower as if they were the ultimate edition collectables.

In his dreams, he did it to gods.

Tony never recognises the formal, almost archaic speech that spills out of his mouth in his dream-time; holdover perhaps from old movies, or some misplaced form of romanticism. Perhaps he thinks Loki would be more malleable to suggestions thus uttered.

Or, perhaps there is a small, sentient part of Tony that knows who he is (hero, human, not monster) and recoils from his baser desires, who creates distance from his own deeds through a different language.

Perhaps his dreams are not necessary those of Tony Stark, merely one who wears his face; demon, incubus.

Away from his pool his lush dreams has Loki encased head to toe in an oversized red cloak, the hooded kind Tony sees witches and virgins wear in classical children's illustrations. Somehow Tony knows that Loki is naked under that cloak; that his feet is bare and always stained with wet, moist soil. Tony's soil.

'Your lips are always blue,' Tony observes as he dips his fingers in the wet black soil and inserts them into Loki's mouth before he could protest. 'There. That's better.'

Somehow he could taste Loki's mouth through the earth, and it was better than kissing, better than anything that could be humanly envisioned.

He withdraws his fingers and examines Loki's silt stained mouth, the dark open waters of his eyes before wrapping scarlet robes around him. 'It will be better now, you'll see. I'll keep you warm.'

'You have taken away my skin,' the Loki in his dream laments.

'I have given you new ones,'Tony says and he gestures at the cloak. 'More luxurious, to keep you warm.'

'Nay, you have done terrible deeds. Please let me go.'

He could feel a smile carving into the flesh of his cheeks as he batted away the god's ineffectual struggling. 'Hush. You do not need a second skin, I'll secure you the most beautiful cloak. Red as your lips; as your eyes. Red as the gift I shall take from your body. I can buy us anything, Loki. Even in my dreams.'

'Please. Don't.'

'Let go, Loki. Let me own you.'

And then it was just soft cries and pale, yielding flesh beneath his rendering hands.

**_~o0o0o~_**

Behind the glass cage, Loki's copy hated him; hated. He ranted and screamed; exerted so much force that he tore the vocals chords in his own throat. He starved, preferring to grow listless and skeletal rather than take the sweet ripe offerings from Tony's hand. He had to be electrocuted, often, as punishment or just to induce some form of rest. And he inflicted terrible wounds on himself in his rabid, desperate attempts at escape.

But he was not the real Loki, and could only channel small trickles of magic, useless and ineffectual. A magnified voice to shout himself hoarse in. A few shattered pieces of furniture, easily replaced. A light with which to pace under at night.

A beautiful, helpless, wild and raging copy of the one in his dreams.

If Tony thought he had been sleepless before, it was nothing compared to the vigil of ensuring Loki did not have the opportunity to hurt himself by any permanent means, including repeating bashing his head against the glass until he left scarlet smears across the screen. Daily, his beautiful copy fought him, snarled like a caged tiger, hissing and scratching and attempting always to inflict damage. Once he even succeeded in breaking the ringer finger on Tony's left hand, very nearly severing it with his teeth. Tony was forced to administer a severe beating for this, something he did not enjoy.

His beautiful copy evades him, slippery as oil until he is caught and wrestled to the floor, bleeding mouth, purple marks everywhere which Tony learnt to read like calling cards – blue bruise from a ten am scuffle. Long, red line from three pm's shattered cup. Black eye from his forced-feed session at midnight.

Oh yes, Loki was determined. Determined and desperate and rabid, but Tony was patient. He had the patience of the earth, the ability to soak emotions up like a sponge with no reaction save the ones calculated to make the god tremble and empty more of himself until he became unwittingly exhausted, spent of the day's anger.

'How shall I tame you,' he whispers into the silence of the cage, '-how still and pliant you will lie beneath me when this is over. I have seen it Loki, I have done this to you, oh so many times in my dreams.' A promise; a taunt; knowing well that somewhere, somehow, Loki can hear everything the human said to his copy, would screech and promise great and terrible vengeance upon Tony, as excruciating as they would be creative.

He liked to watch Loki's copy roar his defiance; the air within filled with so much hatred and hostility that it was seemed like venom condensed on the glass between them. Loki's anger had no power over him. He had already broken the god and feasted on him in one dimension; he could do it again.

For now he had the real Loki to entrap by psychological means, and his fellow Avengers to evade.

**_~o0o0o~_**

'Is this for revenge?' Loki's copy abruptly asks him one day.

'It was never about revenge.'

'Then why?'

Tony laughs. 'The god of chaos, asking for explanations?'

Humiliated, his captive turns away.

'You know this is the way it has to be for us to happen.'

'There is no us,' Loki informs him, but his voice is dull. 'I will find you eventually.'

'Yes.'

'I'll kill you.'

'Yes.'

The god slams a hand violently onto the glass. 'Is this worth your life and the lives of everything you've lived to protect? Because I will root it out one by one, and I will destroy it all.'

Tony lifted his own arm, placed five fingers over Loki's palm on the other side of the glass. 'I will wait for you.'

**_~o0o0o~_**


End file.
